Populations and Population Movements: Year In Review 1993

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

In 1993 Austria, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States all passed laws tightening controls and limiting the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees or began the process of passing such laws. The European Community interior ministers meeting in June in Copenhagen agreed upon a series of measures including stricter monitoring of short-stay visitors and expulsion of those found to have entered or remained unlawfully and exclusion of such migrants on the grounds of public policy or national security.

In the U.S. the year was marked by increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. Politicians such as Gov. Pete Wilson of California focused on the issue, laying the blame for much of his state’s straitened economy on illegal immigrants. Wilson demanded that the U.S. government "reverse the rewards" for illegal immigrants by ending their medical and educational benefits and called for a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship for their American-born children. In this atmosphere Pres. Bill Clinton reversed his campaign pledge on Haitian refugees. On January 14, as president-elect, Clinton announced that he would continue the Bush administration’s policy of forcibly repatriating Haitian boat people, and as president he sent a flotilla of U.S. Coast Guard ships to turn back Haitian refugees. In June he announced a number of immigration reforms--similar to those being adopted in Western Europe (seeSidebar)--designed to tighten controls. These included "expedited exclusion," which provides for dealing with asylum requests within a few days; enforcement of the idea of "country of first asylum"; and withholding of work authorization from all but those who have been granted asylum.

In July, through its Asylum and Immigration (Appeals) Act, the United Kingdom added restrictions to immigration rules. The act removed the right of appeal for those refused admission to enter Britain for a short stay. The law required refugees to seek asylum in the first "safe" country they reached. Amnesty International claimed the new law would increase the number of asylum-seekers expelled by Britain because they did not travel directly there from the country where they feared for their lives but via another country. The "safe" third country rule was upheld by a High Court decision on October 8. In April the Court of Appeal ruled that housing authorities, in order to pass judgment on applications for council (government-subsidized) housing, were entitled to determine whether homeless applicants were illegal entrants. The government later ordered local-government housing officials to carry out immigration passport checks on applicants for council housing.

The new French government of Prime Minister Édouard Balladur pushed a number of laws through Parliament designed, in the words of Minister of Interior Charles Pasqua, to achieve "zero immigration." The measures included the ending of the automatic right to nationality by birth, the requirement that a foreigner marrying a French citizen wait two years instead of the current six months before obtaining citizenship, and permission for the police to carry out random identity checks without judicial control. In August France’s Constitutional Council rejected eight of the 53 articles in the immigration act passed by Parliament on the grounds that they deprived foreigners of basic rights.

In December 1992, after much soul-searching, Germany’s opposition Social Democratic Party agreed to proposals, which had been pushed by the Christian Democratic-led government for years, to tighten immigration laws and limit the rights of asylum-seekers. The new laws that came into effect on July 1 provided that anyone who entered Germany via a "safe" third country--notably Poland and the Czech Republic--would be sent back there. Because all of Germany’s neighbours had been categorized as "safe," however, it was virtually impossible for anyone claiming asylum to enter by land. Walther Koisser, an official of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Bonn, said that he believed there would be a chain reaction to the refugee problem as a result. Germany would "return" asylum-seekers to the safe country through which they had passed, which would send them back to the Balkans or to one of the countries of the former U.S.S.R.--all without any real test of whether they had a genuine case for receiving political asylum.

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